- A cure for honey bee colony collapse?
- Rhizobia bacteria protect soybeans from aphids. More.
“Warty vegetable comes to the rescue”
It looks like a wart-covered zucchini and has an equally unappetising name, but experts say it could help rescue the world’s population from malnutrition and disease.
You can’t always trust a journalist to get it absolutely right, but the above quote does seem to be heaping the manure on just a bit too high. The new boss of the Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center is in Australia talking up his book, which includes the bitter gourd or bitter melon, Momordica charantia. He’s full of sensible advice to Australians, to whit:
“The take-home message for Australians is to eat as many varied vegetables as you can – different colours, orange, green – and make sure you have them in balance with the rest of the diet. … cut back on some of the meat consumption, have less carbohydrates and increase the fruit and vegetable intake, then you will live a longer and healthier life”.
But what kind of a lede would that make?
Thanks Dirk for the tip.
Rainbow breeds
All of these variants in color should be noted and celebrated, but should also be guarded by the breeders to be certain that all of them can be available to future breeders. Past breeders bequeathed this wealth of variation and adaptation to the present generation – and it is important that each generation guard the resource and present it to the next generation as a useful and viable genetic resource.
More complex, more interesting, more hopeful
There is simply no way to summarize Willie Smits‘ Ted Talk. It is a masterful description of putting the complexity in an agricultural ecosystem to work to solve the problems of humans and orang-utans. Just astonishing. And so much more intellectually satisfying than a simplified system. Luscious.
Amy Goldman’s top tomatoes
This is the sort of thing that makes a man lose his faith in the essential random pointlessness of life.
Scientific American yesterday, published a slideshow of Amy Goldman’s favourite heirloom tomatoes on the very same day as she was writing to us about her favourite heirloom tomatoes. Spooky, or what?